Gaspard is a brilliant pupil who makes a clean sweep of all the prizes every year. He despises his family, and do not want to remain a crude peasant like them. Two businessmen, Mister Fereor and Mister Frolichein, want him to work in their factories. The former wins the contest. Gaspard is a young Turk who wants to make his way of life at any cost. He steals ideas from other young men and becomes an occasional informer. He wins his boss over and, as this tycoon has no son, he is adopted by him even though his biological parents are still alive. But unfair competition threatens Fereor's business and Gaspard is forced to marry Frolichein's daughter, Mina.

Gaspard is a brilliant pupil who makes a clean sweep of all the prizes every year. He despises his family, and do not want to remain a crude peasant like them. Two businessmen, Mister Fereor and Mister Frolichein, want him to work in their factories. The former wins the contest. Gaspard is a young Turk who wants to make his way of life at any cost. He steals ideas from other young men and becomes an occasional informer. He wins his boss over and, as this tycoon has no son, he is adopted by him even though his biological parents are still alive. But unfair competition threatens Fereor's business and Gaspard is forced to marry Frolichein's daughter, Mina.

Deserted by his father, and dislocated by the Second World War, Paul is a boy who wants affection and attention and cannot find it at home. For a while, he becomes the pet of some German soldiers, running errands for them. Later, he helps the Resistance, and when the Americans come to stay, he is really in his element with them.

Two teenage lovers are caught up in the thrill of forbidden love in this tragic romantic drama. Pierre (Jean-Pierre Andre) is a 16-year-old French lad who loves 14-year-old Djemila (Nadja Reski), the offspring of Algerian immigrants. Pierre's father is an Algerian war veteran who tolerates living with the immigrants at the low-income housing project as long as the two factions are separated. Djemila's older brother carries bitter hatred for the French over their invasion of Algeria. Both young lovers fall victim to the intolerance of their families when their relatives discover that the two are engaged in a passionate love affair.

Philippe is an older man and an industrialist whose wife is confined to her bed. They have no children. As he is preparing to go on a vacation to the seaside, he strikes up an acquaintance with Paul, a young working-class boy, and decides to bring him along. This is Paul's first glimpse of how the other half lives, with their first-class hotels and so on. When he meets some aristocratic young people at the resort, he tries to put over the fiction that he is of their class, with poor success.

Paul has been imprisoned for ten years for passing counterfeit money. He feels victimized enough, both for the prison time and for the crime which led to it; he committed the crime to give his wife the nice things she asked him for. When he discovers that she has remarried a quite wealthy man, he is outraged. However, his ire is not due to her disloyalty to him; he loved their only son to distraction, and now the boy has no knowledge or memory of him.

After the death of his parents, Pierre is forced to care for his younger sister Nathalie by committing petty crimes. In a recurring motif of Gérard Blain’s cinema, Pierre is taken under the wing of an older gay man, Hubert , who offers him work and financial security; but when Hubert makes advances to him, Pierre robs him and takes up with a group of radical leftists who are planning terrorist attacks. Without employment, Pierre loses Nathalie to child services and spirals into desperation, finally erupting in an act of horrific violence. An x-ray showing the largely undiagnosed sickness of its time, and a stern warning to ours.

After the death of his parents, Pierre is forced to care for his younger sister Nathalie by committing petty crimes. In a recurring motif of Gérard Blain’s cinema, Pierre is taken under the wing of an older gay man, Hubert , who offers him work and financial security; but when Hubert makes advances to him, Pierre robs him and takes up with a group of radical leftists who are planning terrorist attacks. Without employment, Pierre loses Nathalie to child services and spirals into desperation, finally erupting in an act of horrific violence. An x-ray showing the largely undiagnosed sickness of its time, and a stern warning to ours.

An aging dentist looks for a little liveliness by abandoning his wife in favor of a younger woman. When he learns that his mistress also has another younger lover, he gets jealous, but tries not to make an issue of it. In the end, he dumps her and returns to his wife, who is not about to stand for his middle-aged immaturity. She leaves him.